The Vampire King Forgets Me Every Dawn

The Dead Man's Coat

The man wearing Marek Vey's face was waiting beside Marek Vey's body.

Liora found him in the crypt after following the wet prints he had left on the corridor floor. The councillor had always worn velvet slippers indoors. This man wore borrowed boots, too large at the heel, and had stepped in the gutter beside the chapel wall.

He did not turn when she entered.

“Will they bury him in this coat?” he asked.

The real Vey lay on the stone table in a clean linen shirt. His burgundy coat was draped over the chair. A brown patch beneath the breast pocket marked where Liora had pressed it against the wound in his chest.

“His family will decide.”

“Does he have one?”

She stopped three steps from the table.

“You don't know.”

He touched his own face. “I know where he sits. I know what he says when the tax collectors disagree. I can tell you the names of six ambassadors. I don't know whether anyone is coming for him.”

Nera Sol appeared at the door with a lamp. Iven had assigned her to escort Liora after the hearing. Her sword remained in its sheath.

“Step away from the table,” she told the stranger.

“He can't hurt you,” he said, looking at the corpse. “They finished with him.”

“I meant you.”

He obeyed. Under the lamplight his face flickered. For a heartbeat Liora saw a younger mouth and a crooked nose, then the councillor returned. The change was in her seeing, not in his flesh. The corpse on the table did not move. Nothing had been raised from the dead.

“What's your name?” Liora asked.

“Marek Vey.”

“Before.”

He gripped the edge of the table. “I don't know.”

The washbasin stood near Nera. Liora asked her to bring it, then set the dull silver bowl where the stranger could see his reflection. Water still held a red trace from Vey's last washing.

The man in the water was younger than the man standing above it.

Nera inhaled.

“Tom Arlen.”

He recoiled so hard he struck the wall.

“No. They killed him.”

“They announced his execution,” Nera said. “My brother knew him. He carried messages to the eastern gates.”

“When?”

“Eleven years ago.”

Tom held both hands over his mouth. Liora waited while his breathing became ragged. She had expected a threat. She was ashamed of how long it took her to give up the expectation.

“My brother's name is Tomas,” Nera added. “Tomas Sol. He disappeared on the same route. Do you remember him?”

The similar names seemed to cause Tom pain. He shook his head.

Nera turned away. A question she had carried for years had found a living person and still failed to return an answer.

Liora offered Tom the chair. He stared at Vey's bloodstained coat lying across it.

She lifted the coat herself and placed it on the foot of the stone table. He sat down, careful not to look at the dead man's face.

“Did you see what happened to him?”

“No. They woke me after.”

“Where were you?”

“A room with green curtains. They make me sleep when I don't have a part.”

Liora felt sick. She had spent months trying to preserve what the crown took from Sorin. It had not occurred to her to ask where a stolen life might be put afterward.

“Who gave you this part?”

He pressed a finger against the side of his head. A thin cut lay behind his ear, hidden by hair. Something dark shone beneath the skin.

“The lady with the white braid. She said the councillor was unwell. I was to vote for the wedding and go back to sleep.”

Nera went to fetch Iven. Liora stayed, keeping the door open. She wanted Sorin there. She wanted him to see a wound he could not explain as a woman manipulating him. The want embarrassed her, but she did not pretend it wasn't there.

Tom looked at her shawl.

“You have one too.”

“A mark. It isn't the same.”

“Do they let you rest when you aren't being someone?”

She could not answer before Sorin entered.

He stood very still at the sight of the corpse and the living face above it. Then he looked into the basin and saw Tom.

“An appearance laid over a man,” he said.

“And memories laid inside him,” Liora replied. “He knows Vey's votes. He doesn't know whether Vey has a wife.”

“He does,” Sorin said. “They've been married forty-six years.”

Tom began to cry. His face slipped again, showing his own features for longer this time. Sorin removed his cloak and handed it to him. He did not ask him to stop.

“Vey came to my rooms before the poison was found,” Liora said. “He said Sabine had moved something out of the upper archive. He was stabbed before he could tell me where.”

“Did you see who stabbed him?”

“No. I heard him fall outside the door.”

Sorin looked toward the crypt door, then back at his old friend. “He came because I asked him to look into those rooms.”

Sorin touched the dead councillor's wrist. They had known one another for more years than Liora had been alive. The king had forgotten the part of the night in which she had helped Vey; the body made the loss impossible to treat as a private inconvenience.

“The wedding,” he said to Tom. “Whose?”

“Yours. They said I was to say the mark was false and you should choose the regent.”

Sorin's hand closed on the table.

Nera returned with Iven and the royal physician. The physician examined the cut behind Tom's ear without removing the dark sliver. He said taking it out carelessly might destroy memories mixed with the borrowed ones. Tom asked whether that included his own name.

“It might,” the physician said.

“Then leave it.”

Sorin began to object. Liora caught his sleeve, then released it before he could look down.

“He answered,” she said.

The king stepped back.

Iven took Tom to a guarded room with a window and no green curtains. Nera went with him. Sorin remained beside Vey, and Liora waited at the threshold, unsure whether to leave him alone with grief he could still keep.

“Did you see me mourn him last night?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Was I kind?”

“You asked for his wife before anyone remembered to tell her.”

He nodded, looking at the coat.

“That sounds like him,” he said at last.

“Who?”

“The man I was with you.”

She wanted to go to him. Instead she held the door while he walked through it, carrying the coat himself.

Above them, musicians began rehearsing in the great hall. The regent had invited the court to supper. On every place card, in ink still wet enough to shine, she had placed a crowned initial beside her own.